Chronicles of Sjosz

Christmas frenzy

2005-12-22T23:09:00.000+01:00

If you go to the stores before Christmas, be sure to be the first one in. It's been a frenzy this night at the supermarket getting all the supplies in, stacked and stocked and ready for deployment somewhere tomorrow, when mania erupts and customers go shopping cart blazing into the store to get the ingredients for their Christmas dinner. And tomorrow will be no different, especially because we'll have the customers wreak havoc upon the shelves and bombard us employees with questions where that one canister of black pepper was again or if the product that was sold out was still in stock in the back, while we try to keep up and keep the store filled with all the goodies...... with a bit of luck, this'll be a success, and we'll all leave for home happy tomorrow. If not.... well, at least we already did our shopping :)

Early Christmas

2005-12-21T22:02:00.000+01:00

Christmas dinner before it's Christmas... yeah. Still, it was fun, with an uncle, 3 aunts, my little brother and grandma at the same table in a restaurant having a special Christmas dinner menu, 6 courses, way too much cola, and 3 visits to the toilets.... oh well, at least it kept me away from blogging for an hour or more.

Ludicrous

2005-12-19T17:30:00.000+01:00

Man, you have to be fricking sick to stab your own girlfriend/wife when she's a week away from labour. The poor baby died days later too. Mental illnes.... ya think?

Annoyance

2005-12-19T17:22:00.000+01:00

Today is a day that really symbolises annoyance to me. Maybe it's the lack of sleep, maybe it's just my boredom, but I was annoyed by every single thing that went wrong today.
First, I sat at home, waiting all day for some people to show that are going to renovate our roof. I had to be there at 7.30 AM, and at 15.30 PM so that they could do their job. What I didn't know was that they would not show up today. A brilliant waste of my time, sitting there the entire day waiting for a bunch of people that didn't come because it rained the day before. Gah.
I have the feeling tonight is going to be fun, on the workfloor there's plenty of little things I can get annoyed by.... yay today.

Theme, atmosphere, and construction

2005-05-27T14:52:00.000+02:00

Wow, it's been a little while. Time for some more pointless lecturing for your reading pleasure. The last 2 posts more or less covered gameplay, what to keep in mind while creating an environment of your own. A last simple hint for all you mappers out there is to keep the layout of a map SIMPLE. Having multiple routes for a Capture the Flag game sounds fun and all, but having to choose out of 500 different paths to take is overkill. Simplicity is key.

Simplicity is key for gameplay, but not neccessarily for the visual design around your layout. Let's break it down for the record. After you complete testing your layout, and you're satisfied with it, you start designing the visual side of things, meaning, you will want to try and make the map look good. The first term you'll encounter is theme. Theme is a group name for general architectural styles. Industrial, ancient and futuristic can indicate/define how a map looks. With industrial I mean concrete, wood, lots of metal, machinery, pipes, support, steam, and so on. Ancient has a temple like setting, with lots of stone, wood and murals. Futuristic has chrome, metal, and overall, a curvy feel. Obviously, my interpretations of these various themes aren't definitions of these themes, everyone has his/her own imagination, and these are by far not the only themes. Egyptian style architecture for instance, has grown to become a theme, while it would fit under Ancient.
So first, you choose a theme for your map. This all depends on what you're thinking at that moment, and what kind of things you're interested in. Own choice, no debate about that.

EDIT: Dregs has pointed out to me, that a very important part of construction was left out at the start, and that is optimization. Unreal engine works with various methods to keep the rendering process as smooth as possible. In other words, to have as many frames per second (or FPS in short) as possible. Some of these techniques, like use of semi-solids, can better be done during your map's construction than by applying them when everything's done already (this is also why I'm cramming optimization info fairly early into this post).
First technique to use is zoning. What it does is basically dividing your level into various zones. The effect zoning has is that when you do not see ANY part of a certain zone, it won't get rendered. That's how big maps can run smooth, only the stuff you see, gets rendered. Zoning is done by using zoneportals. These are really just Sheet brushes, that 'close off' an area from the rest of the map. These are usually placed in doorways, for instance.
The second technique is antiportals. What antiportals do is occlude (not render) anything that's fully tucked away behind them. For instance, you place a big antiportal between rooms, that are connected by a single doorway. (note that Antiportals should NEVER be visible to a player ingame, so they should be placed in additive space). The rooms are zoned, but you're looking at the doorway, which makes the other room visible, thus it gets rendered. A lot of staticmeshes have been placed in the other room, and even though you cannot see most of them, they get rendered because they're in that specific zone. The antiportal between the 2 rooms occludes these staticmeshes (or any other type of actor, even brushes). The downside to this technique is that antiportals themselves cost rendering power. They should only be placed if the amount of occluded actors cost more rendering power than the antiportal itself.
Next is zonefog. Although it's used more for atmosphere than for optimization, zonfog can help out a bit. It's usually only used for optimization in ONS levels, as these are big enough. What zonefog does is create a coloured 'fog' that gets thicker over distance, which is fully configurable. At the point and beyond where the fog reaches 100% thickness, thus resulting in non-vision, stuff gets occluded.
CullDistancing! Another technique to use, but not usable that often, CullDistancing puts a limit of distance between the actor (mostly staticmeshes) and the player. When this distance limit is passed, the actor will no longer render. This should only be used occasionally as you may imagine, seeing stuff disappear while you're still able to see them isn't a good thing.
Collision is one of the biggest optimization tricks in the book as well. You have to make sure that all the staticmeshes used in your map have the simplest collision possible. Collision is a huge rendering power consumer, so the simpler the collision, the less rendering power needed. This especially goes for staticmeshes with high amounts of polys.
One of the best pages to visit for all these optimization techniques is the one at UnrealWiki -> http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/Map_Optimization

When you've chosen a theme, you start working on it. A absolutely undeniable aspect of a theme is consistency. Consistency means that all the visual elements in a map are in harmony with each other, all the stuff in an industrial map has to look industrial, so no ancient gates in a factory like setting, and no rusty pipes in a futuristic setting. There are, of course, plenty of style variations, but make sure that every variation in your visual design is justified, make the visual elements believable. The same applies to audio in an environment. If you're wandering around in a factory, what would be the most likely sounds you'll hear? Noisy crickets, or humming machinery? Wind chimes, or hissing pipes? If you have music accompanying the environment, make sure it fits, some old tribal drumming track won't really sound well if you're standing in chemical plant.
A second, very important, thing you should always remember, is being able to distinguish areas in an environment. If you have 4 rooms with about the same size, don't make all the textures/meshes (3d models used for decoration, usually made in Maya or 3dsMax) the same. Variation is key. A pretty good way of making one area look different from the other is the variation in lighting. Use different colours (that go together), but accentuate areas with contrasting colours, and vary the use of each colour in each room differently. Even if you have implemented breathtaking details in your map, if you have multiple rooms that look almost exactly the same, the map will get old/stale/boring really fast.
The third important thing (or at least, to me) is detail. Attention to detail can be very rewarding, people will notice the difference between a tiled floor and a tiled floor with loose tiles/cracks in it, with small shrubs sticking out the soil in those cracks. This obviously doesn't mean that you have to make all your tiled floors into soil/shrub infested loose tile paradises, but you'll probably get the point. The great importance when implementing details is, again, variation. Cracks in the floor or holes in the wall? Make sure that every crack and hole looks different. Deja vu is no good.

That covers theme. The next thing you want in your map while spending time on the visuals, is atmosphere. What is atmosphere? I think atmosphere can be described best as a feeling. A good example here is Doom3. With the constant growling coming from the shadows, and the eerie silence in certain dark areas you can easily feel afraid, while nothing happens. If you have the opportunity, try playing that game in the middle of the night, when it's completely silent around you, with surround sound and no lights on. If you could observe yourself, your breathing would adapt to situations, getting heavier when things get tense/scary. THAT is atmosphere. Atmosphere is also the feeling that the place you're walking around in actually exists somewhere. The theme and surroundings would be realistic then, very convincing. How to get atmosphere? It's different for every map, but the right use of lighting, texturing, detail, audio and theme consistency can get you anywhere.

The last real point on the visual agenda is the construction. Make sure that the construction is architecturally justified. Don't have silly floating platforms that can obviously not float in some industrial map for instance. With every bit of construction you do, ask yourself when testing whether it feels 'real' or not. The most important part of construction is that you keep in account that the environment has to be playable afterwards, meaning performance related issues. The more details you put into your map, the more power it'll cost the game to render it all, which has direct influence on the amount of frames per second. To have an indication what would be a good amount of frames per second on your own pc, play maps that come with the game, and see how many frames per second you get in those maps. Those maps are retail maps, and retail FPS is often tested for months and months, so keeping to that is a good standard. Do keep in mind that you play retail maps that are comparable in size with your own map. Getting 40 FPS in the biggest retail maps doesn't justify 40 FPS in a 3 room map you made.
I think I'll leave it at this for now. Hopefully this helps all you mappers who happen to read this dumb little story of mine...

Gameplay: enter the tourney

2005-05-09T23:17:00.000+02:00

Right, gameplay. I went through some of the main aspects of gameplay in the previous piece of text, now for application. The first thing that you need to take into consideration, especially with a modern day FPS game like Unreal Tournament 2004, is that your layout shouldn't be less important than the way it looks. Therefore, creating a layout should primarily be done withOUT the visual appeal. This kind of strategy to build maps is used by hobbyist and professional companies alike, and can be called very efficient. The visual side of things is ALWAYS a less important aspect of a map than gameplay, and you'd do good to keep that in mind when you start mapping.
Getting a good layout means that you pay careful attention to several things. The first thing you should keep in mind is the scale. Unless you're purposefully making a 'mini-me' map (a map in which the player seems really small), you would be better off using a scale model for your map. With scale model I mean an object that represents the physical dimensions of a player. The next thing to do is to keep in account the movement for a certain game. In Unreal Tournament 2004, a player can double jump, dodge jump, wall dodge etc. These movements require some space to execute, but using these moves for useful shortcuts or trick jumps stimulates gameplay. These 2 things can really alter the way you look at map dimensions, for instance the distance between ledges can be done using a double jump plus walldodge from the left wall, or something like that. Rookies could play the map, but the more skilled players could play it too. Layout is probably THE most important aspect of gameplay. A good suggestion would be to have all sorts of players (skilled ones, trick jumpers, hardcore, mainstream, rookies) test your layout before you finalize it and move on to the next part. This goes for ALL gameplay related aspects by the way.
The next big step on gameplay implementation is item placement. This mostly goes for FPS type games, where you pick up weapons/health throughout a map, especially in multiplayer games. Now the placement for singleplayer is very different from the placement for multiplayer, and I will take a look at multiplayer this time. (again, having lots of people test it really helps tweaking out the right type of placement)
Does the word 'refined' ring any bells? If you've read the previous text, it should. Item placement/weapon placement is something that makes or breaks a map, just like the layout. You can have made the best layout in the world, without a decent item placement to back it up, it won't stand out. A few ground rules for item/weapon placement:

- Never centralize a lot of the pickups in one part of the map, this'll make that part very well travelled, while the other areas never get visited.
- Divide weapon types over the map, don't place hitscan (instant hit) weapons close to each other, don't place the more powerful weapons close to each other, don't place important pickups (like a big shield or damage amplifier) close to each other.
- Placing ammo pickups near the corresponding weapons promotes 'camping' (staying in one place, stake-out), placing ammo throughout the map stimulates movement through the map.
- Divide health/shield pickups over the map, but not in a way that fleeing from a firefight will always result in being healed, have defined locations for health.
- Place superpickups (the big shield/damage amplifier) in somewhat trickier places to get to or to get out from. Higher priority should be leveled with higher risk.

After finalizing your weapon/item placement, gameplay is almost covered. The last real issue is performance, but that will probably only become an issue when you start making your map look beautiful. As you may know, games draw their power from video cards and your CPU/RAM. The more visual stuff a game has to render, the more power it costs. Rendering ranges from the amount of textures onscreen to the complexity of collision for objects to lightsource radii/player lighting. Of course, toning down your settings often helps getting the framerates you want, but supporting players by making sure by not having to render more than the game needs to is a smarter thing to do.
For Unreal Tournament 2004, here's a few things that are considered to be the best ways to optimizing a map to it's fullest framerate potential:

- Zoning ; sectioning the map into zones makes the game only render a 'zone' when it's visible for the player, thus saving on rendering power. This is probably the most important way to optimize.
- Anti-Portals ; anti-portals are the alternative for when a map cannot be logically zoned, or if zoning just doesn't help enough. Placing an antiportal will make anything behind it from the player's view unrendered. Therefor, an antiportal should NEVER be visible for a player, place it under terrain or behind a wall.
- Cull distancing ; Cull distancing means that you put a limit to when an object is rendered, in terms of distance of the object to the player. When the defined distance is exceeded, the object will no longer be rendered.
- Collision ; making use of simple collision (non-complex forms) really helps the performance. Selfmade meshes/meshes with a large amount of surfaces/vertices will have very complex collision unless you apply simple collision.

That about covers the gameplay part of level design. Any comments or questions are appreciated, and feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong. I'll have a chat about visual design for level design next time...

Gameplay

2005-05-03T16:58:00.000+02:00

Okay, this is a post for the people that like reading about level design, a big blink to Arcadia. So if you're not into video games, or not into aspects of their design, then I'd suggest you skip this little topic.
Today's third topic is gameplay. Now as you may know, gameplay is THE crucial part of a game that will either make it good, or bad. Surely the visual aspect of a game counts, as well as AI (if applicable), but gameplay is the most important part of a game, and that's why games should be focused on gameplay.
Gameplay is not just one aspect, dozens of little things have to be taken into account for gameplay to be good. First, there's the intuitive controls. Playing a video game, be it on PC or on a console, you like to be in control of things. The feeling that every action you take using your keyboard plus mouse, or controller, accurately reflects the actions performed in the game, is a first essential part of gameplay.
Secondly, there's the difficulty of a game. If a game is too simple, or too difficult, it's gameplay can be considered bad. The hard part with adjusting a game to a certain difficulty is that not every person who plays the game has the same amount of gaming experience/skill, as difficulty is a personal impression. Luckily, many games have the built-in option to adjust the game's difficulty to your own skill.
Thirdly, the entire visual/dynamic setup of the game must be believable. For instance, if you have a First Person Shooter game (FPS in short) in which you battle humans on loose platforms in the middle of space, it wouldn't be very believable. A naturesque setting in the woods, with a nice splashing waterfall and a rippling pond, however, make a much more enjoyable and plausible setting for such a game.
Those are all example aspects, if I covered all of them I'd still be typing here tomorrow, but the key with almost every single one of these elements is refinement. If an environment you can walk around in isn't refined, you'll find sloppy lack of detail or unfinished things you're not supposed to see, which we conveniently call bugs. If controls aren't defined, you can find the controls feel like you're walking on slippery ice, if the difficulty isn't refined enough, the game will only attract certain groups, either mainstream gamers, or their opposite, the hardcore gamers.
Now I'm going to be a little bit more specific, I'm going to discuss gameplay for one certain game, especially to please the UCMP team members who read this. Unreal Tournament 2004 is the game I'm currently designing maps for, and I'm lucky to be teamed up with a great bunch of people who have good knowledge of what they're doing, both with designing maps as in real life. All the sucking up aside, the UCMP team is focused on designing maps that primarily offer the gameplay players of the game are looking for in a map.
The gameplay dynamics for Unreal Tournament 2004 are very similar to most games within it's genre, which is FPS. Dynamic movement, balanced set of weapons/pickups, and action all around you. The key elements in bringing all this forward in a single map are easy to be listed, but often hard to live up to. To mention some of them; plenty of space, but not too much, plenty Z-axis, but again not too much, map layout with good flow, balanced and refined item/weapon placement, good AI, and a pretty sight to look at while playing. Though the last one I mentioned has hardly anything to do with gameplay, the believability of an environment often contributes to enjoying a match in that map. Taking all these things into account, you better know what you're doing when designing a map, because the community that receives it in the end can be very warm and friendly, but cold and hard as well.
I'll sign off with the promise that I will rant some more about applying gameplay to a map in the very near future...

Between studies

2005-05-03T15:16:00.000+02:00

What a fascinating time, it's unimaginable unless you've experienced itself.
Back in February, I decided to quit my study at the University of Nijmegen. I studied British Language & Culture for little over 6 months, and I sincerely regret the time I've wasted trying to understand and apply the hard aspects of language study, phonetics and literature. At the start of the study I was optimistic, as I have jumped over every past educational hurdle carelessly. But I underestimated the study.
The first subjects thrown at us were fairly simple to follow, do your studying, do your 'homework', and be present during college hours, and we'd do fine. The subjects after the first period, however, became a serious nuisance from my perspective. Heavy literary debates about what Dickens meant with certain parts of his books aren't exactly the things I value, and phonetics becoming harder and harder to follow, I decided to drop out, even though I had never imagined to be the person that would do so.
Now, I'm waiting for the right study to come along, and it's called Game Design. Being one of my favourite ways to spend my time, level design is slowly becoming part of my life, and making sure it'll be part of my working life as well only comforts me.
The freedom one experiences when in between studies is enormous, especially if one doesn't have to take care of him/herself, financially.

Birth of a blogger

2005-05-03T14:45:00.000+02:00

Everything is new, the world looks awfully bright, and a half masked person with gloves spanks me on my ass, time to enter the realm of the living.
Years have passed, revolution after revolution took place, social talks on the couch were replaced by chatrooms, and meeting new people hardly happens in the real world anymore. In a time of chatting and flaming, I have created a small piece of blog to store and deposit my thoughts on trivial things as life, both offline and online, for you to see and comment on.
Welcome to my blog, enjoy your stay...